shawnbass.com - All blogs

Default location for VM creation in Virtual PC 2007

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:15:18 GMT

A client of mine has standardized on Virtual PC 2007 for desktop virtual machine needs (not for their VDI or Server VMs, but just simple desktop VM needs). They recently created a transform for customizing the default install, but after deployment noticed that there was one major issue with the package. The issue is that VPC picks a subfolder of "My Documents" named "My Virtual Machines" as it's default store location when creating a new virtual machine. This would obviously be a very bad choice when using Group Policy enforced managed folder redirection (just imagine how slow the VMs would be if they were stored on the network!, not to mention issues around home drive quotas, etc). Anyway, the packaging team couldn't find an option in the app, nor a registry setting anywhere to change the default folder location for this. Also, since we're dealing with a network location, you can't get by with a subst command or junction point. While I didn't know the answer myself, I figured Google might. After a quick search I came across a blog entry from Mr. Virtual PC Ben Armstrong. Ben states that the solution is to create a system environment variable named MYVIRTUALMACHINES and set it to a path on local disk. So as an example you could create a path named C:\VMs and then set MYVIRTUALMACHINES to C:\VMs. Thanks Ben!

Citrix Delivery Center Visio Stencils

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:43:55 GMT

Daniel Feller from the Citrix Worldwide Consulting Solutions group has posted a nice set of Visio Stencils for the new Citrix Delivery Center components. This includes visio shapes for all the new XenApp branded components as well as XenDesktop, XenServer, Password Manager, Netscaler, WANscaler, Branch Repeater, etc. I definitely recommend picking up a copy if you frequently do Visio diagrams of Citrix infrastructure components. And thanks to Daniel for sharing this with the community.

I've been selected by Microsoft as a Terminal Server MVP

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:14:44 GMT

I received an email yesterday that I was nominated and approved for a Microsoft MVP in Terminal Services. What can I say other than I'm honored to be included in such a great group of people who contribute so much to the community at large. Thanks to everyone for their support. My MVP page can be found here. One of these days (when I get free time) I'll actually update my profile to include all the relevant info. Also, Congrats to the other new Terminal Server MVPs: Seung Heun Noh: Terminal Server: Engineering, Greg Shields: Terminal Server: Author, and Joe Shonk: Terminal Server: Architecture.

Virtualize a Citrix server?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:28:24 GMT

The age old question of whether or not you should virtualize a Citrix server. It use to be a diffcult question because the virtualization platforms were not very optimized for a Terminal Server workload. Many things have changed in this regard, and now it's not such a crazy decision anymore. There are certain use cases where it's a no brainer (license servers, web interface, secure gateway, etc). However, for pure Presentation Servers it was always a bit of a toss up. On one hand you have a situation where you know you're going to get less users than on physical hardware, versus the other side that says since 32-bit Windows is limited to 2 GB of kernel memory, then virtualizing some Citrix servers on a 16GB or 32GB server carved up into several Terminal Server VMs will scale more users than a single physical instance on th equivalent server hardware. But that's comparing a physical install using 32-bit Windows, not 64-bit. Still, it does make a lot of sense to at least consider virtualizing your Terminal Servers on a VM platform. Now, which platform to choose? While VMware clearly has more experience (read: existence) in doing this, XenServer has an advantage which is that they have the developers of Citrix (and to some degree Microsoft) at their disposal. With some of the recent optimizations that Citrix has made in XenServer, they've been able to bring the overhead of virtualization down to 7% on 64-bit Citrix XenApp. The virtualized 64-bit XenApp was able to host up to 70% more users than the virtualized 32-bit instance. This isn't that big of a surprise though since the 64-bit instance isn't limited by kernel memory like the 32-bit instance is. I recommend checking out this blog entry over at Citrix for some more details on how they conducted their testing if you're interested in this.

Process Monitor has been updated to support the latest SoftGrid / App-V Release Candidate

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:24:00 GMT

I recently came across this blog entry posted on the App-V blog stating that Process Monitor was recently updated to support the new App-V Release Candidate that was just released last week. You can get version 1.35 of Process Monitor here. Also, did you know that you can launch the SysInternals tools directly from the web by visiting live.sysinternals.com Check it out, it's pretty helpful.

Al Solorzano on Group Policy Preferences

shawn@shawnbass.com — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:52:24 GMT

Al Solorzano recently posted a nice article on Group Policy Preferences over here. If you're not familiar with Group Policy Preferences, it's the technology that Microsoft acquired from Desktop Standard. GPP is a nice way of extending management reach to registry settings that were previously not able to be managed by Group Policy (at least not without those PITA Administrative Templates anyway). There's also some powerful capabilities for filtering that are largely lacking from Group Policy. While out at Citrix Synergy a little over a week ago, I had the pleasure of some great conversation with Al at a group dinner outing. Al is extremely knowledgable about a variety of technologies and I highly recommend following his blog (if you don't already). Al's blog can be found here.

Attending Synergy? Then borrow video camera, make cool video, and get free video camera...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:09:41 GMT

Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix has recently posted a blog entry about a social networking contest that's being conducted at the Citrix Synergy event next week in Houston. If you happen to be attending, here's how the process goes:

You comment on Vishal's blog entry stating that you'd like to borrow one of the FlipVideo cameras.
You record some 5 minute video segment capturing your thoughts (or someone elses if you don't have any LOL) regarding the Citrix Synergy event.
You turn the camera back into Vishal the following day.
All the videos get uploaded to YouTube.
The top 5 most viewed submissions will receive the FlipVideo camera for free.

I'll be at Citrix Synergy, and this blog gave me a good idea to bring my FlipVideo camera. Only I won't have to adhere to all those crazy "rules". I'm such a rebel... Oh yes, I will be videotaping analysts...oooh..... And I might even upload videos to my site, or maybe even some other site.... Uh-oh now I've gone and said it...

TechEd video describing new features in SoftGrid / MAV 4.5

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:39:35 GMT

Justin Zarb recently blogged about a video he found from a TechEd session where John Sheehan gave an overview of the new features in SoftGrid / MAV 4.5. I'd love to give all sort of nice comments about the video, but I'm plagued by the Silverlight Download Error 4001 so I can't even watch the video. Anyway, I'm passing it along in case you haven't seen Justin's blog entry about it.

XP SP3 officially re-released

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:47:44 GMT

Microsoft has officially re-released Windows XP Service Pack 3 today. Get the full download here.

The ultimate guide to Citrix MFCOM SDK

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:36:45 GMT

Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix sent me a tip that Dr. SDK (head Citrix MFCOM jockey) has updating his SDK Guide "Scripting MetaFrame". The new guide can be found here and is a must read for anyone attempting to use MFCOM from VBScript/PowerShell, etc.